Putrifiers II

In the Red; 2012

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At this past July's Pitchfork Music Festival, the scheduling gods played a cruel joke on fans of fuzzed-out San Francisco garage-rock by placing scene vets Thee Oh Sees and their prodigal-son pal Ty Segall on competing stages with overlapping set times. The irony was not lost on Thee Oh Sees' frontman John Dwyer, who, despite getting their show off to a righteously arse-kicking start, jokingly begged to the crowd after three songs "don't leave!" as Segall's set time approached. This simple, self-deprecating plea effectively delineated the difference between these two like-minded, furiously prolific acts.

Segall, after all, is in the midst of a banner year that's seen him release two albums-- including his best to date, Slaughterhouse-- with a third on the way, and he's still young enough that his whimsical, impulsive approach to recording forms a media-friendly narrative of the punk wunderkind realizing his true potential. On the other hand, Thee Oh Sees are the latest, albeit the most durable, in a long, 15-year lineage of Dwyer-helmed projects, and one whose consistency-- in terms of both quantity and quality-- makes for a somewhat less sexy story. Dude releases a shit-ton of records because, after all these years in the game, he's still restless and resourceful.

That said, Putrifiers II is Thee Oh Sees' first album of 2012, which is a weird statement to be typing considering that we're well into September. (Though given the band's ceaseless output, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that a Putrifiers I was recorded and scrapped somewhere along the way.) Thee Oh Sees' records have more or less charted the band's evolution from Dwyer's solitary psych-pop project to brute-force hypno-punkers. Now, with their reputation as one of America's most redoubtable live acts wholly assured, Thee Oh Sees use Putrifiers II to explore the possibilities of the studio and more lustrous modes of psychedelia. It's not exactly uncharted territory for Dwyer and company, but where Thee Oh Sees are prone to segregating their more refined pop sensibilities from their gonzo-rock rave-ups (as their two 2011 releases, Castlemania and Carrion Crawler/The Dream, respectively illustrate), Putrifiers II reconciles these two modes, providing a more complete, elaborate picture of this band's many capabilities and strengths.

Which is to say: If the sheer enormity of Thee Oh Sees' dense discography has proven too forbidding for you to delve into, Putrifiers II is a convenient summary/gateway, opening with a killer shot of the band's patented echo-drenched fuzz-punk delirium ("Wax Face") and closing with a baroque, string-swept lullaby ("Wicked Park"), while traversing all points in between. But even as Putrifiers II turns more melodic and mellow, broadening the band's sonic scope with strings and woodwinds, it retains the nervy irreverence: With its shrieking cello line and opium-den ambience, "So Nice" unabashedly kneels before the shiny leather boots of the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" and, as such, becomes a knowing allegory for the master/slave dynamic that plays out in the original.

If the drawn-out title-track dirge and the moonlight-strolling "Will We Be Scared?" (the sort of warped, revisionist 50s-style ballad Bradford Cox has made his stock-in-trade) threaten to curb the mid-album momentum, they prove to be effective calm-before-the-storm set-ups to the mighty "Lupine Dominus", which manages to condense everything that is great about Thee Oh Sees into three thrilling minutes: Dwyer and Brigid Dawson's eerily androgynous harmonies cooing a disarmingly childlike melody, and a car-crash tangle of guitar/organ noise, all hitched to a steely Krautrock pulse. It feels like the sort of song that, after so many years of exploratory recordings, could very well define the true sound of Thee Oh Sees. Or it's the sort of peak moment that could give Dwyer reason to tear it all down and radically redefine his band once again. At the very least, we know it likely won't be long before we find out.